Tying Up Some Loose Ends
The average, normal, properly-functioning member of the blogosphere would likely look at the past few weeks of my life and note that there was nary enough time to take an extra breath in between the ravenous typing and documenting required to get them all adequately addressed and reported on teh Intarwebs. I (as you, faithful reader, must now know) am not an average, normal, properly-functioning member of any aspect of society, so I had the exact opposite reaction. Rather than rush to my computer to get things properly written down, I decided to take some time to myself and enjoy the furious up-and-downs of the end of undergraduate life.
Now, with only one exam left between me and the most expensive piece of paper I've ever purchased, and further with no desire whatsoever to study for said exam, I've decided to take this opportunity and speak a little bit, with some distance, on what's transpired over the last very quiet month.
For the most part, I've been living the quiet life, enjoying a month of relative freedom from obligations -- and playing lots and lots of video games. Like literally a metric shit-ton. In the past week alone, I've played a ridiculous amount of "Tanks!," one of the entries contained in the very tasty Wii Play arcade-style games suite (which gets pretty high marks on the fun scale from this objective reviewer). The game is pretty much like crack: it's ridiculously addictive, probably incredibly harmful for my health, and like a lichen grows on you with each sitting. I've also played through both quests of the original The Legend of Zelda. Twice. Each. In addition, I'm square in the midst of working through the underrated Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, all of which I've been playing through the glory not of Wii's Virtual Console but through the magic of NEStron and my many emulators. (For this, I must thank Michael. You've ruined hours upon hours of potentially-fruitful productive hours, and I can't thank you enough for it.) As if that wasn't enough, I've been spending lots of time at the Penthouse working through the Donkey Kong Country series of games -- as of this writing, I've completed the original at 101%, Diddy's Kong-Quest at 102%, and I'm around 20% through Dixie Kong's Double Trouble.
I'll say it again, as if it's not completely obvious by this point: I've been playing a LOT of video games. It's fucking sweet as hell.
The explanation for my obsessive gaming is, quite simply, the fact that I can. Immediately after my last posting, which coincided with the tragic events of April 16, I was faced with a huge personal crisis: I had not only the emotional obligation to deal with Danielle and the toll that the shootings were taking on her and her friends, but I also had a much more pressing academic obligation, in that my thesis was due a mere two weeks later. Obviously, those last two weeks of April were utterly abysmal. My head was in a million and a half different places (but when is it not?) and I was typically thinking about one thing when I should have been thinking of something else. As such, the actual motivation for getting going on the thesis was utterly shot, despite the frightening realization that I was seriously running out of time to put it off. As the deadline creeped up, and I found myself at times literally strapped to the keyboard at a cluster computer -- ever notice how personal computers pick the shittiest times possible to crap themselves and stop working properly? -- there was a constant up-and-down between the realization that I would actually make it under the deadline and the fear that I would crash and burn before the deadline.
In an effort to not recall those nervewracking moments, and to spare my loyal but dwindling audience from the pain of having to re-experience those moments of intellectual pressure, let's just say that, while I came within the last hour before the due date, I was able to get the beast done, bound, and submitted in time. After the fact, when going over the really nice personal copies for any silly mistakes, I noticed a horrendous typo -- basically, instead of deleting an aborted sentence and starting over, I started a new paragraph and the new sentence was the topic of said paragraph, presenting the appearance of starting a paragraph but never finishing it -- but other than that, it was a pretty clean copy. Ultimately, though it was constructed in a far-from-admirable method -- I was toasted jokingly for writing Princeton's best 72-hour senior paper, and was ascribed the moniker of "fastest thesis in the west" -- I ended up scoring a 92, which gave me a solid and very surprising A-, for which I was endlessly thankful. (Charles, who got the same grade, and, as mentioned, was done a month before our due date, was less than thrilled: "Why do I even try? Why?")
The downer of all this (besides the insane amount of stress experienced at the end of April) was the complete annihilation of all of my motivation. I was lucky enough to have a paper, which was originally due on May 4, postponed until Dean's Date (May 15), so I didn't have to try and grab some extra motivation just after finishing my thesis, so I was allowed to basically take the last week of classes off and savor the happiness. I bought myself some new music and some new video games (anyone surprised?), wore a ridiculous pirate hat for the whole day, drank lots of booze, played lots of guitar, and just generally enjoyed each new beautiful day. It was probably the happiest week I've had all year. I got to just enjoy myself, take my time, catch up on lost sleep -- did I mention I slept for four of the last seventy-two hours before my thesis was due? -- and hang out with my friends. It was a relief, it was relaxing, it was enjoyable. It was also the first time I felt like I was actually going to successfully graduate from Princeton, which led to the beginning of the feelings of nostalgia and the sense that my time here was going to end very soon. A bittersweet ending, to be sure.
The bittersweetness extended into the beginning of Reading Period. As classes came to an end, and I lamented the fact that I would never attend another professorial gathering as an undergraduate ever again, another big accomplishment came to fruition. The Band's newest CD, The Plaid Album, had undergone a semester's worth of intense rehearsal, and with the conclusion of the second and final recording session on May 8, was a series of master tracks that will, eventually, become an actual album. It was really rewarding to have my three years of Band participation culminate in such a fantastic achievement -- we sounded really good in the studio during the recording sessions -- and I'm both proud of what we've been able to create and sad that I had to join the party a year late. If I could have my years at Princeton to do over again, I'm pretty sure the only major change I'd make would be to join the Band as a freshman. That, and I'd take Fleming's class on Chaucer. But pretty much nothing else.
Of course, if my own undergraduate career was to come to an end, so too would those of the people I love, and the graduation season began, appropriately enough, with a trip to Blacksburg for Danielle's commencement. I'm not sure what I was expecting from the event, but I was pleased and proud and happy that things went well. The University commencement was a mix of somber remembrance and thoughtful reflection, and never got too teary or disappointing, which I feel was the right tone since this was, after all, a celebration. (The moment where diplomas were posthumously awarded to the thirty-two students who were killed, however, was a real heartbreaker, and you could hear a pin drop in Lane Stadium after the final name was read.) The department commencement was decidedly more upbeat and celebratory, and was made even more extravagant by the revelation afterwards that Danielle had, in fact, made summa cum laude by acing her last exam. I couldn't have been more proud of her than I was at that moment, which made the whole weekend all the sweeter. And I was also really glad that I didn't have any moments of lingering things in my past come back to haunt me, but was just able to enjoy myself and revel in the great accomplishment my sweetheart had done.
My time since then has been spent in finishing up my own academic obligations. And video games. In fact, mostly video games. But in fairness, I did have to finish up my last two undergraduate papers -- one of which was good, the other may or may not have been as good -- and take an economics exam that I couldn't give less of a shit about if I tried. Now, I'm down to the wire. I've finished my comps (which I absolutely adored and rocked the A- on, which pleases me), and by noon tomorrow, I'll have no more work at all to do before graduation. It will truly be all over but the screaming.
The time is coming to bust out the cap and gown and hood, get everything straightened out nicely, prepare myself for the moment in which I'll be able to put them on and get some nonsensical Latin muttered to me and my A.B. compatriots, words that will declare us officially as alumni -- I still can't get used to that word -- of Princeton University. For that moment when I will finally be allowed to walk out of FitzRandolph Gate and fulfill the destiny laid by 259 classes of Princetonians that have come before me. It feels both awe-inspiring and overwhelming, and I'm not really sure how I'm going to react to it. Hell, when a girl at Danielle's commencement sang the Tech alma mater, all I could imagine was how proudly I would sing "Old Nassau" on June 5, how my heart would almost certainly swell to unfathomable heights as we, with one accord, all rejoiced.
Fortunately, there are little things in life that continually ground me. Like today, when Stu found himself on the receiving end of a catastrophic vehicular breakdown just before the George Washington Bridge and Charles and I, intrepid adventurers of North Jersey that we are, trekked north to bring he and Mary back safely to Princeton. While I'm sure Stu could not have enjoyed the day very much at all, and I feel very badly for him about what went down, it's a comforting reminder that not everything goes according to plan. I like the idea of surprise, of having a set plan but having little deviations here and there. It gives me hope that I won't slip into ennui at any point in the near future, that as I enter the frightening but exciting new world of graduate school, it will excite and fascinate me even more than my wonderful undergraduate years did. However, I'd really appreciate it if the weather held up for June 5. Knock wood.
I guess my feelings over the last month can be summarized, cheesily enough, by the other big news of today. At 5:00pm today, my beloved K-Rock came back on the air, ending the nearly 18-month absence of rock music from New York airwaves. As much as I celebrated the return, I couldn't help but recall that I'd never changed my car presets when the format first changed, that I'd kept 92.3 on the dial, perhaps in the hopes that it might return. And while I'm sure I had absolutely nothing to do with the return of WXRK (after all, I did listen to Free FM a decent bit, for lack of anything better to listen to), I'd like to think that the faith I'd placed in that preset played some small part in its reemergence. I've put a lot of faith in silly little things like that over the past four years, and in the month since my thesis has been completed, I've found that faith paying off in lots of ways, but mostly in the nostalgic feeling I'm already holding for Princeton and for how much I value the experiences and the people that I've shared and met while here, people and experiences I'll surely miss for all time.
Most of all, the faith I'd placed in myself by matriculating here -- the faith that I could actually do this -- will, in a little over 12 hours, be acknowledged with the smiling inevitability that I will, without question, graduate from the storied hallows of Nassau Hall. I will have done it.
Hell, I've got enough faith that I'm not going to blow my exam tomorrow, so I'm going to just say it.
I fucking did it.
Goddamn, that feels good.
Now, with only one exam left between me and the most expensive piece of paper I've ever purchased, and further with no desire whatsoever to study for said exam, I've decided to take this opportunity and speak a little bit, with some distance, on what's transpired over the last very quiet month.
For the most part, I've been living the quiet life, enjoying a month of relative freedom from obligations -- and playing lots and lots of video games. Like literally a metric shit-ton. In the past week alone, I've played a ridiculous amount of "Tanks!," one of the entries contained in the very tasty Wii Play arcade-style games suite (which gets pretty high marks on the fun scale from this objective reviewer). The game is pretty much like crack: it's ridiculously addictive, probably incredibly harmful for my health, and like a lichen grows on you with each sitting. I've also played through both quests of the original The Legend of Zelda. Twice. Each. In addition, I'm square in the midst of working through the underrated Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, all of which I've been playing through the glory not of Wii's Virtual Console but through the magic of NEStron and my many emulators. (For this, I must thank Michael. You've ruined hours upon hours of potentially-fruitful productive hours, and I can't thank you enough for it.) As if that wasn't enough, I've been spending lots of time at the Penthouse working through the Donkey Kong Country series of games -- as of this writing, I've completed the original at 101%, Diddy's Kong-Quest at 102%, and I'm around 20% through Dixie Kong's Double Trouble.
I'll say it again, as if it's not completely obvious by this point: I've been playing a LOT of video games. It's fucking sweet as hell.
The explanation for my obsessive gaming is, quite simply, the fact that I can. Immediately after my last posting, which coincided with the tragic events of April 16, I was faced with a huge personal crisis: I had not only the emotional obligation to deal with Danielle and the toll that the shootings were taking on her and her friends, but I also had a much more pressing academic obligation, in that my thesis was due a mere two weeks later. Obviously, those last two weeks of April were utterly abysmal. My head was in a million and a half different places (but when is it not?) and I was typically thinking about one thing when I should have been thinking of something else. As such, the actual motivation for getting going on the thesis was utterly shot, despite the frightening realization that I was seriously running out of time to put it off. As the deadline creeped up, and I found myself at times literally strapped to the keyboard at a cluster computer -- ever notice how personal computers pick the shittiest times possible to crap themselves and stop working properly? -- there was a constant up-and-down between the realization that I would actually make it under the deadline and the fear that I would crash and burn before the deadline.
In an effort to not recall those nervewracking moments, and to spare my loyal but dwindling audience from the pain of having to re-experience those moments of intellectual pressure, let's just say that, while I came within the last hour before the due date, I was able to get the beast done, bound, and submitted in time. After the fact, when going over the really nice personal copies for any silly mistakes, I noticed a horrendous typo -- basically, instead of deleting an aborted sentence and starting over, I started a new paragraph and the new sentence was the topic of said paragraph, presenting the appearance of starting a paragraph but never finishing it -- but other than that, it was a pretty clean copy. Ultimately, though it was constructed in a far-from-admirable method -- I was toasted jokingly for writing Princeton's best 72-hour senior paper, and was ascribed the moniker of "fastest thesis in the west" -- I ended up scoring a 92, which gave me a solid and very surprising A-, for which I was endlessly thankful. (Charles, who got the same grade, and, as mentioned, was done a month before our due date, was less than thrilled: "Why do I even try? Why?")
The downer of all this (besides the insane amount of stress experienced at the end of April) was the complete annihilation of all of my motivation. I was lucky enough to have a paper, which was originally due on May 4, postponed until Dean's Date (May 15), so I didn't have to try and grab some extra motivation just after finishing my thesis, so I was allowed to basically take the last week of classes off and savor the happiness. I bought myself some new music and some new video games (anyone surprised?), wore a ridiculous pirate hat for the whole day, drank lots of booze, played lots of guitar, and just generally enjoyed each new beautiful day. It was probably the happiest week I've had all year. I got to just enjoy myself, take my time, catch up on lost sleep -- did I mention I slept for four of the last seventy-two hours before my thesis was due? -- and hang out with my friends. It was a relief, it was relaxing, it was enjoyable. It was also the first time I felt like I was actually going to successfully graduate from Princeton, which led to the beginning of the feelings of nostalgia and the sense that my time here was going to end very soon. A bittersweet ending, to be sure.
The bittersweetness extended into the beginning of Reading Period. As classes came to an end, and I lamented the fact that I would never attend another professorial gathering as an undergraduate ever again, another big accomplishment came to fruition. The Band's newest CD, The Plaid Album, had undergone a semester's worth of intense rehearsal, and with the conclusion of the second and final recording session on May 8, was a series of master tracks that will, eventually, become an actual album. It was really rewarding to have my three years of Band participation culminate in such a fantastic achievement -- we sounded really good in the studio during the recording sessions -- and I'm both proud of what we've been able to create and sad that I had to join the party a year late. If I could have my years at Princeton to do over again, I'm pretty sure the only major change I'd make would be to join the Band as a freshman. That, and I'd take Fleming's class on Chaucer. But pretty much nothing else.
Of course, if my own undergraduate career was to come to an end, so too would those of the people I love, and the graduation season began, appropriately enough, with a trip to Blacksburg for Danielle's commencement. I'm not sure what I was expecting from the event, but I was pleased and proud and happy that things went well. The University commencement was a mix of somber remembrance and thoughtful reflection, and never got too teary or disappointing, which I feel was the right tone since this was, after all, a celebration. (The moment where diplomas were posthumously awarded to the thirty-two students who were killed, however, was a real heartbreaker, and you could hear a pin drop in Lane Stadium after the final name was read.) The department commencement was decidedly more upbeat and celebratory, and was made even more extravagant by the revelation afterwards that Danielle had, in fact, made summa cum laude by acing her last exam. I couldn't have been more proud of her than I was at that moment, which made the whole weekend all the sweeter. And I was also really glad that I didn't have any moments of lingering things in my past come back to haunt me, but was just able to enjoy myself and revel in the great accomplishment my sweetheart had done.
My time since then has been spent in finishing up my own academic obligations. And video games. In fact, mostly video games. But in fairness, I did have to finish up my last two undergraduate papers -- one of which was good, the other may or may not have been as good -- and take an economics exam that I couldn't give less of a shit about if I tried. Now, I'm down to the wire. I've finished my comps (which I absolutely adored and rocked the A- on, which pleases me), and by noon tomorrow, I'll have no more work at all to do before graduation. It will truly be all over but the screaming.
The time is coming to bust out the cap and gown and hood, get everything straightened out nicely, prepare myself for the moment in which I'll be able to put them on and get some nonsensical Latin muttered to me and my A.B. compatriots, words that will declare us officially as alumni -- I still can't get used to that word -- of Princeton University. For that moment when I will finally be allowed to walk out of FitzRandolph Gate and fulfill the destiny laid by 259 classes of Princetonians that have come before me. It feels both awe-inspiring and overwhelming, and I'm not really sure how I'm going to react to it. Hell, when a girl at Danielle's commencement sang the Tech alma mater, all I could imagine was how proudly I would sing "Old Nassau" on June 5, how my heart would almost certainly swell to unfathomable heights as we, with one accord, all rejoiced.
Fortunately, there are little things in life that continually ground me. Like today, when Stu found himself on the receiving end of a catastrophic vehicular breakdown just before the George Washington Bridge and Charles and I, intrepid adventurers of North Jersey that we are, trekked north to bring he and Mary back safely to Princeton. While I'm sure Stu could not have enjoyed the day very much at all, and I feel very badly for him about what went down, it's a comforting reminder that not everything goes according to plan. I like the idea of surprise, of having a set plan but having little deviations here and there. It gives me hope that I won't slip into ennui at any point in the near future, that as I enter the frightening but exciting new world of graduate school, it will excite and fascinate me even more than my wonderful undergraduate years did. However, I'd really appreciate it if the weather held up for June 5. Knock wood.
I guess my feelings over the last month can be summarized, cheesily enough, by the other big news of today. At 5:00pm today, my beloved K-Rock came back on the air, ending the nearly 18-month absence of rock music from New York airwaves. As much as I celebrated the return, I couldn't help but recall that I'd never changed my car presets when the format first changed, that I'd kept 92.3 on the dial, perhaps in the hopes that it might return. And while I'm sure I had absolutely nothing to do with the return of WXRK (after all, I did listen to Free FM a decent bit, for lack of anything better to listen to), I'd like to think that the faith I'd placed in that preset played some small part in its reemergence. I've put a lot of faith in silly little things like that over the past four years, and in the month since my thesis has been completed, I've found that faith paying off in lots of ways, but mostly in the nostalgic feeling I'm already holding for Princeton and for how much I value the experiences and the people that I've shared and met while here, people and experiences I'll surely miss for all time.
Most of all, the faith I'd placed in myself by matriculating here -- the faith that I could actually do this -- will, in a little over 12 hours, be acknowledged with the smiling inevitability that I will, without question, graduate from the storied hallows of Nassau Hall. I will have done it.
Hell, I've got enough faith that I'm not going to blow my exam tomorrow, so I'm going to just say it.
I fucking did it.
Goddamn, that feels good.
posted by Dave at 5/24/2007 09:47:00 PM
1 comments
